Ash (The Elemental Series, Book 6) (2 page)

The set of Lark’s shoulders was bent, though I was one of the few who would see the slight curl as though the weight of a redwood had been placed squarely on them, holding her down, trapping her underneath it. Her chin was high, and her stride defiant, even now. But her heart . . . I could almost hear it cracking under the punishment.

Banished by her father, the King of the Rim, to the desert; it was a death sentence for most Terralings. For Lark, though, I prayed to the mother goddess it was not the same for her. She was more than just a Terraling. Born a half-breed, she carried two elements within her. Earth and Spirit flowed through her veins in amounts that made her a powerhouse of epic proportions.

Spirit allowed her to be more than any other elemental that our world had seen in a thousand years. I could only hope it would be enough to keep her mind intact. Elementals didn’t do well outside their homes for more than a few months. They slowly lost their minds as their hearts and souls craved the connection they had to their place of power, whether it be the Rim, the Pit, the Deep, or the Eyrie. Without a foot in the place of their home, they seemed to unravel, an event that left not only their lives in danger, but the lives of the humans around them.

If Lark unraveled . . . I was not sure the world could survive the consequences.

I could not let her go. I steeled myself for what I was about to do.

The king raised his voice as I took a step to follow Lark.

“Any who have contact with Larkspur will also be banished. I will not have her ideas infecting our family further than they have thus far.” His voice rolled through the Rim, boosted by his connection to the earth. Unlike Lark, I couldn’t see him use his power, but I could feel it course across my skin like a faint breeze. The crowd was dispersing, and I should have held my tongue. I knew better than to challenge the king. I was an Ender, not even of the royal family. I had no right to call him on his actions. But it was Lark he was sending away, not some criminal.

And she was my heart. I was not sure I wasn’t already banished.

“Are you serious?” I didn’t even try to stop the words, and powered them as he had powered his only a moment before. They drew not only the king’s attention, but the remaining crowd too. If nothing else, they loved something to gossip over. And an Ender facing the king was about as good as it got after the scene with the king and Lark. First he offered her the crown, which she turned down, and then he banished her as punishment. It made no sense.

His green eyes flashed with irritation, but not true anger, which surprised me. “I have lost my daughter today, Ender. Do not question me.” His words hummed with power, almost making me want to go to my knees. My vows as an Ender were simple, but they bound me to be obedient to the ruler over all else. Which made me want to bow my head in acquiescence to his words. I fought the urge, steadied my knees, and kept my eyes on him, locking him in a stare that had made more than one elemental shake with fear.

“You chose to lose her,” I said. “You chose to cast her out. That was your decision, not hers.”

The remaining crowd sucked in a collective breath. But the king just shook his head as though a deep sadness permeated him. “You are an Ender. I do not expect you to understand what I must do to rule our family and keep it safe. I do not expect you to truly understand the costs we all must pay.” He turned his back on me and walked away, his back stiff and his stride firm as he entered the Spiral. Belladonna, Lark’s older sister, followed him.

She glanced back at me and mouthed something I didn’t quite get, but guessed at. She would keep trying to convince her father that Lark should not be banished. That she should be brought back.

A hand touched my arm and I glanced down to see Blossom, an Ender who trained with Lark, at my side. Her brown eyes were crinkled at the edges with worry and her mouth trembled ever so slightly. As if she were holding back tears. For an Ender, she was soft. But seeing as there weren’t many Enders left, I wasn’t about to tell her that.

“Ash, are you going to lead the Enders still?” she asked.

What choice did I have? I had been commanded not to follow Lark, by her own words, and by her father’s.

“Yes.” The word felt like a betrayal to Lark, like I was giving up after nominal effort. An effort blown away like dandelion fluff on the wind of a child’s breath.

A thought began to gather in my skull, a dangerous, traitorous thought I did not try to tamp down. Because it meant taking action, and action I understood.

I put a hand on Blossom’s shoulder. “Gather all the Enders and the Rim guards in the barracks. I need to speak to them right away.”

She bobbed her head. “I’ll have them there before the sun tops the redwoods.” She spun and ran from me, her braid flapping against her back. I glanced up where the sun cut through the trees. Less than half an hour, then, and Blossom would have the other Enders waiting for me.

Which gave me time for those who were left standing, grieving Lark’s loss.

Three of us were left in the main clearing of the Rim. The other two who loved Lark the most, perhaps outside of Belladonna and myself, had not moved from their spots. I stared across the Rim to where Peta sat in her snow leopard form where she had also watched Lark leaving us; Shazer stood with his head bowed beside her. Lark was gone, disappeared into the forest, but they remained where they were. As if she would suddenly appear, and tell us to come with her.

But that wasn’t Lark’s way. She would take this punishment, and try to protect those she loved.

Peta quivered all over, making the spots on her coat tremble and dance as though they were alive. Her ears laid flat back to her skull as the tip of her tail lashed violently back and forth, creating a groove in the dirt. As Lark’s familiar, she was bonded to her charge, and losing that connection with her was going to be brutal on them both. From what I knew, it wasn’t only the elementals who suffered when they were banished.

And in Peta’s case, she’d lost more charges in her life than any other familiar, which could only make this that much more painful. A reminder of the past, as well as the culmination of this current pain.

Shazer, though, wasn’t a true familiar. More like . . . an addition to Lark’s small army of those who would fight at her side. He chose to stand with her against his very creator. Against those forces breaking the world apart piece by piece, despite the fact he didn’t have to. His ears flicked toward me as I approached, but he said nothing. A rare thing when it came to him and his smart-ass quips.

Carefully, I drew close to Peta, mindful of the fact that she could decide I should have done more to stop what happened to Lark, and end up taking her grief and anger out on me. Not that she would be wrong, in my opinion. I dropped to one knee beside the spotted feline and gently put a hand on the top of her head.

“Peta, she will be okay. She is strong enough for anything that is thrown at her, you know that. We both do.”

A soft mewl escaped her and she pressed her face into the crook of my neck, surprising me. “You don’t understand, Ash, my heart is shattered. I only just found her. To lose her again is more than I thought would be asked of me. This is beyond cruel.”

I didn’t argue with her; the bond between elemental and familiar was one I didn’t have. But I knew what it was to love someone, and know you might not ever see them again. I’d believed for two years that Lark was dead, with only the driving hope that I was wrong, and that Peta’s belief was right—that Lark lived somewhere. To find her alive, to hold her again . . . and then to see her cast out and cut off from all those who loved her. A spear to the belly would have hurt less.

I kept an arm around Peta, keeping my thoughts to myself. There would be no arguing with Peta that perhaps I did understand, at least, a little of what she was going through. Her own grief was too overwhelming. And perhaps that said it all—I could still function, while she struggled to breathe, her sobs against my neck shuddering through us both.

“I must go.” Peta pulled away from me, and seemed to gather herself, closing down her emotions with a single blink of her big green eyes. She flicked an ear at Shazer. The Pegasus snorted and trotted in time with the snow leopard toward the far side of the Rim.

“You sure you want to go now, cat? I won’t begrudge you a time to rest,” he said. She answered only with a leap, shifting as she did and landing on his back with ease. She glanced back at me. “Stay out of trouble while I’m gone.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“I have a task that Lark asked of me.” She blinked twice and then bobbed her head. “I will be back soon enough, and then we will find a way to fix this.”

I nodded, grateful she was still with me. For two years, we’d acted as elemental and familiar, even though we did not have that connection. Peta was my friend, probably my closest friend after Lark. “Yes, we will. Be careful, Peta. There are still forces out there that would take you out if they could.”

She bobbed her head again, but neither of us said the name out loud. Cassava. The bitch queen who had started the avalanche that had caused these current events to unfold. She was still out there. I was sure of it.

And with her alive, no one, especially those who Lark loved, was safe.

I lifted a hand in farewell, stifling the urge to tell Peta . . . what? That I would be fine and wait quietly for her to return? I snorted to myself. If Peta or Lark thought I would let the banishment slide, perhaps they didn’t know me as well as they thought. I had other plans, and already I saw how I could make them happen.

There was something I could do, something I should have done before. I had been too stunned by the events to truly realize what was happening before it was too late. And there had been more than a few moments where I thought all would be well, where I would see Lark as our queen.

Instead she’d taken her punishment, but at a cost that was ridiculous . . . banishment was meant for those who were traitorous, murderers . . . for elementals who would try to destroy our world, not save it. Not all who were banished lost their minds; some faded into nothing, their bodies going back to the element they were spawned from. A few went wild, their minds cracking under the strain until they lashed out. Those were fewer and further between than the four families made them out to be.

I did not doubt that if Lark cracked, the very foundations of our world would be at risk.

Which meant that both for her sake and the sake of our family, I had to stop this madness before it twisted any further out of control.

I strode toward the Spiral, needing to speak to Bella before I faced the Enders. She would be integral to what I planned, the linchpin I needed to know I could rely on.

The Spiral was where the seat of Terraling power resided, and where I would find both the king and Bella. A giant grouping of trees from every nation wrapped around one another, woven together in time, bark and sap. A variety of leaves and flowers swept outward from the trunk, a true mishmash of flora.

I hurried up the steps that led to the great tree and the curling trees that made up the massive living structure. The interior was far larger than the exterior, a gift from the mother goddess.

The two guards at the main door nodded to me as I passed. I paused, making eye contact with them one at a time. “Fifteen minutes, I want you at the barracks.”

Both saluted me. As an Ender, it was my job to keep not only the king and his family safe but our entire elemental family. As the head Ender, I was in charge of the Rim guards as well. And I would need all the help I could get if I was truly going forward.

There was no reason to hold me back from what I planned in my head—the safety of those I was sworn to protect was on the line. The safety of my elemental family, and even the royal line.

A coup was not something easily done.

With Bella and the other Enders and Rim guards standing with me, we could make it happen, and with Bella on the throne, she could lift Lark’s banishment. The solution seemed simple, even though I knew it was anything but.

Bella could make right where her father had gone so very wrong, and the only way to do that was to take the king down once and for all.

The halls of the Spiral were sparse. Those elementals who kept it clean were nowhere to be seen, and I quickly realized why. The yelling from the throne room was no doubt the cause of their absence. I picked up my pace, feeling the tension rise in the air as I drew closer to the throne room.

I found the king and Bella nose to nose, and she wasn’t backing down. The sight was odd; it was unusual for him to go toe to toe with his oldest daughter. Briar and Keeda, the younger two sisters, were also there, though they stood off to the side. Keeda stared at nothing, her mind gone ever since her encounter with Lark in the Pit.

Briar kept her eyes down, as though the ground at her feet was incredibly interesting. She was the quietest of the bunch, with no thoughts of the throne or power.

“Father. You must lift the banishment off Lark,” Bella said. At her side sat her daughter, River. As a half-breed, the small child didn’t look as much like our elemental bloodlines as the others in the room. River had dark hair and bright blue eyes like her biological father, and her body was going to be tall and slim, not curvy like her mother—that much was already apparent in her long limbs. She clung to her mother’s skirt, staring up at her grandfather as he glared down at them.